Article in St. Louis Post-Dispatch About Razine M. Wenneker
Jewelry junkie BY KATHIE SUTIN Published: Saturday, Apr. 24 2004
A local metalsmith weaves wearable art out of gold and silver threads and has created a bracelet kit that anyone can use. While some people are lucky enough to find their passion early in the game, Razine "Ray" Wenneker of Frontenac came to hers at midlife. Her passion: creating jewelry with metals. She even weaves, knits and crochets with fine threads of silver and gold and incorporates the results into her jewelry. And she has invented a silver-link bracelet kit that requires no soldering.
She had always loved art and had planned a career in dress design. But while she was a student at Washington University, she met and married her husband, Alvin. To help put him through his medical training, she left the university and got a job as a secretary.
She eventually returned to school part time at Webster University while raising her children. Although she was qualified to teach art when she got her degree, she opted to become an elementary classroom teacher instead.
During the years she taught, Wenneker continued expanding her artistic experiences. "I did many different things - basket weaving, silk-screen printing," she says. "You name it, I did it. I did acrylic painting, I did watercolor. I did enameling. I did everything. I never really focused. I liked to try everything."
But a few years before she retired in 1985, a visit to a small museum in California changed her life. It would help her focus her dabbling and ultimately find a second career.
"There I saw some beautifully executed pieces by two artists," she says. "They were metalsmiths and the heads of their respective departments at universities. But their primary interest was textile techniques in metal.
"They wove with it, they knitted with it, they crocheted with it with fine silver and fine gold, and I was absolutely fascinated. It blew me away."
Wenneker tracked the artists down to find out how she could learn to work with the silver and gold threads, too. That summer she went to Tucson, Ariz., to take a workshop with one of them.
"I just fell in love with the metal," Wenneker says. "I love the fact that you can get so close to it. It was an extension of oneself. I started originally crocheting with it and then weaving with it. I had done basket weaving, so I knew a lot of the techniques."
She continued teaching, but she also continued working with metals, taking classes at Maryville University and Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville. She also began taking private lessons with Heikki Seppa, the head of the metalsmithing department at Washington University, who became her friend and mentor.
In 1995, Wenneker became a founder of the Society for Midwest Metalsmiths, a nonprofit organization that promotes, develops, educates and encourages individuals who are interested in metalsmithing.
After she retired, Wenneker began selling her jewelry through word of mouth and by taking special orders. Her work is also sold at Tresa Vorenberg Goldsmiths, a gallery in Santa Fe, N.M., and has been featured in Vogue International Knitting magazine and in a book titled "Wire in Design" by Barbara McGuire.
As people noticed Wenneker's jewelry, some would ask how she did it and whether they could learn to do it, too. She suggested craft centers and universities in the area where they could acquire the skills to do metalwork. Before long, however, she figured out why some people got discouraged.
"A lot of them were intimidated by using the torch or the tools," she says. "That's when the kit idea came about." Wenneker designed a kit that newcomers could use to make a beautiful Byzantine bracelet. The kits are sold through her company, Ellie Rose Link-Able Designs.
Wenneker had taken classes where various jewelry pieces were made without soldering. But how to present the procedure in a way that was easy to learn and would not frustrate the participant? That's where Wenneker's experience as a teacher came in handy.
"I remembered from my first-grade experience the way children learn. They've got to see it, they've got to feel it, and they've got to hear it," she says.
The people using her kits couldn't hear it unless she was doing a workshop, "but they certainly could see it and they certainly could feel it.
Wenneker decided to map out the steps in making the bracelet and color-code them. She included in the kit colored links that could be used for practice before users assemble the silver links.
"It's so much easier to follow when you do a test of it using the colored links," she says.
Wenneker takes pleasure in teaching people to make the intricate-looking bracelets.
"People will come in and say, 'I'll never be able to do this,' " she says. But they're surprised to find out that they can, she adds.
Wenneker says the bracelets can be made by all age groups. She recalls that an older woman in one of her first classes was very intimidated at the prospect of working with the small links.
"She said, 'If I finish this, I'm going to give it to my granddaughter.'
"As she continued to work on the bracelet, the person she was giving it to changed from her granddaughter to her daughter. But by the time she completed the project, she said, 'You know what? Maybe I'll make another one for her. I'm going to keep this one for myself.' "
